An Overview of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Air Quality Measurements: Present Applications and Future Prospectives
By T. Villa, Felipe Gonzalez, Branka Miljievic, Zoran D. Ristovski, Lidia Morawska. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2016
365 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Assessment of air quality has been traditionally conducted by ground based monitoring, and more recently by manned aircrafts and satellites. However, performing fast, comprehensive data collection near pollution sources is not always feasible due to the complexity of sites, moving sources or physical barriers. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with different sensors have been introduced for in-situ air quality monitoring, as they can offer new approaches and research opportunities in air pollution and emission monitoring, as well as for studying atmospheric trends, such as climate change, while ensuring urban and industrial air safety. The aims of this review were to: (1) compile information on the use of UAVs for air quality studies; and (2) assess their benefits and range of applications. An extensive literature review was conducted using three bibliographic databases (Scopus, Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar) and a total of 60 papers was found. This relatively small number of papers implies that the field is still in its early stages of development. We concluded that, while the potential of UAVs for air quality research has been established, several challenges still need to be addressed, including: the flight endurance, payload capacity, sensor dimensions/accuracy, and sensitivity. However, the challenges are not simply technological, in fact, policy and regulations, which differ between countries, represent the greatest challenge to facilitating the wider use of UAVs in atmospheric research.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1ff5cdadaa8215d885c398fb0a3691550ad5770
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In Environmental Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Security analysis of drones systems: Attacks, limitations, and recommendations (2020, neutral): “• Environmental Management: Drones can be used to perform pollution measuring tasks [60] (i.e environmental drones for air quality measurement and analysis [61] , [60] , [62] ), agricultural tasks [63] (i.e soil analysis, crop/seed/livestock management and pest control [64] , [65] , [66] , [67] ), o”
- Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities (2019, background): “mission can be divided into two parts: the onboard sensor can sense/collect pollution data, and the drone’s communication equipment with its larger power sources, can easily send the data across over much larger distances than those possible using a standalone sensor [171], [172].”
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, positive): “The UAV also took a vertical sounding in the eye of the typhoon and measured the strongest winds during the whole flight mission [69].”